Editor’s Pick: System Supports Mobile Printing Via WiFi

By DE Editors

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

February 29, today, is unofficially Sadie Hawkins Day. It’s the day, or so lore has it, when Ms. Hawkins chased the unmarried men of Dogpatch until she caught one, who thus became her groom. If not, she had to wait another four years to try it again. Waiting four years to chase down anything is an eternity. For that matter, it can feel like four years waiting around until a printer heats up then grinds out your document at some pokey pace. Océ North America has been at the forefront of developing multifunction wide-format printing systems for engineering environments for years now, and it has a new one that sounds like it’s been worth the wait.

The Océ PlotWave 350 builds off its predecessor, the Océ PlotWave 300, and starts with a print speed that’s 50% faster. To be precise, 6 D-sized pages a minute. But what makes the speed even faster is that it has instant-on technology, which, according to the literature, means less than 1 second warm-up time and, depending upon the mode, 31 to 40 seconds until first print (A1 / D-size paper). Now that’s all good stuff, but that’s not why you should consider looking into this printer.

See, the real wait you get rid of with the Océ PlotWave 350 is the “you’ll have to wait until I get back to my desk” wait. The Océ PlotWave 350 works like a modern engineer works. For example, it has what is called Océ Mobile Plot and Océ Mobile WebTools software. Among the features this software offers is that it supports mobile print submission and scan retrieval over WIFi. That means you can grab a document and send a print request from your mobile phone or from your desk over a wireless network. You can also print from or scan documents to a USB flash drive or your mobile device.

Another neat ability of the Océ PlotWave 350 is its new Océ Print Driver 2.0 for Microsoft Windows. Basically, this gets you out of printing jams — not paper jams, although the Océ PlotWave 350 has mechanisms that minimize the chances for misfeeds. Rather, it comes with a preview mode that shows what your document is going to look like and, more importantly, where you might have hassles — things like bad fold lines or size errors. And then you can fix your flub right there and get to work. Again, working as a modern engineer should.

You can chase down more details about the Océ PlotWave 350 from today’s Pick of the Week write-up and from the links after the main text. In this “you snooze/you lose world,” waiting can be deadly to your productivity and to your ability to impress bosses and clients. While time will always be required to print out something, the Océ PlotWave 350 seems to go to new lengths to make many print, copy, and scan process delays no longer necessary.